("Hild", "Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style", "Christmas Days")

[fiefoe]

Nicola Griffith's novel about a 7th century female saint is both well-researched and well written. Too bad that it's way too long and the Game of Throne stuff with a smaller footprint isn't my cuppa.

• She liked the rhythm of her days: time alone (Cian didn’t count) and time by the fire listening to the murmur of British and Anglisc and even Irish. She liked time at the edges of things—the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood—where all must pass but none quite belonged.
• She frowned. She wasn’t frightened. She was three; she had her own shoes.
• their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.
• No one was laughing now but Ceredig, and it was his laugh-because-I-am-king laugh, the one for important visitors, to show ease in his own hall. Everything a king does is a lie, Onnen said.
• Onnen added oak gall to the rinse water for Cian’s turn. <> “You rinse mine with vinegar,” Hild said, peering at the tub of black water,
• Onnen took all three of them, because wet unhappy children had a tendency to quarrel when unminded.
• If you think you’re going to smile at a gesith’s boast, you must let your hair fall to hide your face. Like this.” <> “I know that one!” Hild remembered her mother’s words exactly—the light of the world must remember everything. She repeated them proudly: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
• All she heard was a blackbird, far away, and the burble of the spring. She wondered where the water came from. She wondered this in British, the language of wild and secret places.
• “And as we fight you may think secretly to yourself, Those arms are mine, I have but to say the word and they are in my hand again, I have the power to take them back anytime, anytime.”
  He rose up on his toes, and back down, thinking. “Anytime?”
  “Anytime.”
  “It is mine?”
  “It is yours. That is your secret power.” Holding secrets, her mother said, made a man feel mighty.
• (flax harvest:)They laid cloth on the ground and shook the already dried bundles until seed rattled out; children carefully folded the cloth and carried it to the women who funnelled the tiny golden-brown seeds into jars and sent the cloth back to be laid again; at which point other wealh pulled the bundled stems through the coarse-toothed ripples set like arrowheads into posts to pull free the empty seedpods. It was thirsty, scratchy work;
• Hild was long since tired of watching women and men from the loft in the byre and under a bench in hall... All they seemed to do was lie to each other; the women did it while giggling and the men while boasting. She had no idea what that had to do with strength.
• Her mother could do anything with a spindle or a distaff in her hand, and Hereswith and Mildburh were already working on a diamond twill. She hated the idea of not knowing how to do something when it was time. <> Besides, everything they said was wrong. Ceredig was not Cian’s real father. And Hereric was an ætheling who had been poisoned in exile and no one cared anymore. Even the men who had come with them from Elmet were deserting them. Her mother was bitter, she knew, but she understood: How was a man to measure his worth without a noble lord to fight for and receive rings from?
• At the western end was a stone table and niches. An altar, Onnen said: whether to Mithras, to the Christ, or to the goddess of the spring, nobody knew.
• Her smile was the kind of smile Hild had imagined on the water sprite’s face as she pulled her down and drowned her.
• She switched back to Anglisc. “If you drink more the cup will be easier for me to hold and you will have my gratitude. And,” in British again, “the housefolk have said that the mead from the hall jars is not of a strength of that first poured for the king. He will be amazed at your steady head.” She grinned. “Though who knows who has paid which man to say what in the hope of foolishness?” <> They took a moment, the grown man in clothes foreign to him and the young girl in splendour she could barely carry,
• She looked at Edwin. “Edwin, King, I will carry your gold. I will carry it as a princess does, as a crown.” And she bent her head—but also her legs.
  When Edwin put the heavy ring on her head, Hild locked her knees and straightened one inch, two. It was like carrying the world. But she pushed with her feet and lifted and lifted until her spine was as straight as a plumb line and the weight poured through the muscles along her spine and in her thighs and calves and feet. She gestured to the houseman and turned to face Dunod and his folk. Then she accepted the cup.
  This was for her path, for her freedom, for her life and family. To make her dead da proud. She was strong. She was royal. She would set her will. She would do this.
• Like the last time Cwenburh miscarried, her women had washed her and carried her away to a new apartment, so that when she woke she would not have to remember staring at the heroic embroidery of the white horse, or the blooming apple tree, or that knot in the pine cladding on the ceiling while she screamed and bled and pushed and wept: for a bladder-size sack of slimed slipperiness, for nothing.
• But she said, over and over, there was no power like a sharp and subtle mind weaving others’ hopes and fears and hungers into a dream they wanted to hear. Always know what they want to hear—not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn’t even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.
• the hard, thin-faced camp women—strange women who spoke Anglisc and wore knives and strike-a-lights on their belts, but no distaffs, no spindles; women who darned and mended but never spun, never wove.
• “Rhoedd is prideful. It is easier on a man’s pride to truckle to a great king than to a starveling. And so we preen.” <> Even the dogs were fitted with bright collars.
• She always imagined them galloping away, leaving. That’s what the redcrests had done; they’d left. They left behind their stone houses in Caer Luel and beautiful white fountains, their red-tile roofs and straight roads, their perfectly round red bowls with pictures of dogs hunting deer around the rim, their exact corners and glass cups. And now the marble statues had lost their paint and stood melancholy white streaked with moss; tiles had blown off in storms and been patched with reed; men built fire stands directly on the cracked and broken remnants of once-brilliant mosaics. <> But the fountain still worked. It was a series of white stone bowls arranged on a white stone stem, like a flowering pinecone made of cold, smooth marble.
• And they all watched her, all the time, and none came near—except, in the dark of night, and only briefly, Onnen and Cian. She had accepted the mantle of the uncanny and until the end of this journey it was her fate. It was her vision they marched to, into a future she had dreamt for them. <> She rode a thin grey horse, a thin grey hound ran at the hem of her blue-grey cloak, and she sat tall, an enamel copy of a ten-year-old girl, hard and cold.
• she heard cowbells. Their dull clank was almost tuneful, occasionally harmonious. She had never heard of such a thing, but now that she had, she wondered why every cow in the world didn’t have a tuned bell around its neck. <> As the mist began to dissolve she could see the dark, wet beach. Long-legged birds speared shellfish, and women with sacks collected coal and driftwood, dodging the surf that ran up over the sand like the froth in a milkmaid’s pail. The sky showed as blue as twice-dyed linen. The sea was restless, glinting like napped flint.
• she didn’t interrupt. She had found that people, especially people who spoke a different tongue, would get anxious if they didn’t get to have their say in their own way, even if they spoke in a long rush, hurrying to get their words out. Like the strange Psalter. <> “The Psalms are all written together,” she said. “No beginning and no end, all in one long rush. Fursey says it’s to imitate the long breath of god.”
• Accusations of drunkenness to an Irish noble, no matter his priestly vows, were tantamount to accusations of faith-breaking, for the word or boast of a drunken man was not to be relied upon.
• He had no idea how difficult it was to read. To read in another tongue. To turn that tongue into Anglisc. She would never again make a difficult thing look easy.
• “Hereswith will soon be peaceweaver elsewhere.” And maybe her mother would go with her sister. And then it would only be Hild and the king, and her cloak of otherness.
• “What do you think pays for gesiths? Gold. And there’s as much gold to be had from trade as from killing a man and taking his. More. Think. See the whole isle. Who controls the flow of trade?”... “But Rædwald, now Eorpwald, soon Æthelric, controls the Anglisc trade for all of the south, trade with Frankia, Rome, Iberia.” <> Suddenly she saw the whole east side of the isle as one strong warp, weighted by the overking, with the main pattern wefts flowing through Tinamutha and Gipswīc, lesser threads through Lindum and the Humber, and minor threads like the Bay of the Beacon. But cloth had more than one warp.
• Like Hild, the older ones sought shelter. They knew from long experience that beer wears off by dark but clothes stay damp until morning, and wet blades and chain-link armour rust slowly and thoroughly if not sanded and regreased immediately.
• One man in Kent or East Anglia could write something and give it to a man, who could gallop until he and his horse were half dead, then pass it to another man, a stranger, who also could gallop, or board a ship, and pass it to another messenger, and another. The message would cross the island in a day. It wouldn’t be garbled. It couldn’t be intercepted and understood by any but priests. Shave-pated spies. Not just skirt on one side and sword on the other but book balanced against blade.
• Hild returned her attention to the goldsmithing. She had watched the bronze casters at Bebbanburg. This was different. It was like watching seasoned gesiths marching from three corners of a rough field to slot smoothly into a shield wall, or listening to a bard build a familiar song. The Svear didn’t have to watch the furnace or mind the kiln, he didn’t have to shake the slurry, he had only to think of pleasing shapes and build them in wax—smoothly, unhurriedly—so that a clay mould could emerge from the kiln and be filled with gold. She thought of women always having to break the flow of their spinning to catch a child back from the fire, or pause in the heckling of tow to bind a wound …
• Hild barely heard him: Somewhere a man was calling in a peculiar cadence, and he sounded almost Anglisc. Almost. Instead of the rounded apple thump of Anglisc, these oddly shaped words rolled just a little wrong. Not apples, she thought. Pears. Heavy at the bottom, longer on the top.
• The piglet burst from the crowd, trotters twinkling. Hild moved easily, like a mother scooping up her toddler as it runs gurgling towards the fire. The piglet squealed as she swung it up by its hind legs, then stopped when she swept her blade across its throat.
  Blood pattered on hard-packed dirt.
  She wiped her knife on her thigh. Sheathed in pig blood. It would do.
  She looked around the circle of silent men. To the ætheling she said, “Two pennies for your pig,” which was more than fair, and, to the Frisian, “Three scillings for the wealh.” She thrust the dead pig at Fursey. “Pay them.” The crowd parted silently and she strode through.
• “Just one or two, mind. For those times when a visiting stranger has news. So that the seer always has the news first, for a seer taken by surprise is a very sorry seer indeed.” <> Hild hadn’t thought of it that way.
• She unwound the linen to reveal a hard slate-grey curl of a stone, like a frozen worm. <> “A snakestone,” Fursey said. “The local legend is of some harried god turning all the snakes into stone so that he could get some peace from the peasants’ pitiful petitioning.”

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Some critic says the blend of Paul Rudnick's signatur fey humor and the heavy subject matter of AIDS causes 'tonal whiplash', and it's so apt.

• As the child of an office manager mom and a physicist dad, I’d been encouraged to apply to Ivy League schools but with Jewish fears attached. I should strive to succeed but expect obstacles.
• Piscataway, a town named for the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire. Not making sense doesn’t bother anyone in New Jersey.
• I knew we weren’t rich, but I’d never lacked for anything except a Barbie doll, which a well-timed tantrum eventually achieved.
• The voice was maddeningly but somehow naturally affected, as if the person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier. <> “Look at all of you,” the voice continued, and the crowd swiveled to see someone vanish from the greenroom doorway, a WASPy blur in khakis, a navy blazer, something hot pink, and something Kelly green, like a well-bred magic trick.
• my mother’s amniotic fluid was floating with an olive and a silver Cartier toothpick. So I may very well suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, or to use the proper Latin terminology, inherited wealth.”
• I was figuring out that sex includes both the physical event and the story you’re telling yourself; kissing Farrell wasn’t only mindless euphoria, but added a potential love interest and a plot twist to the page-turning yet critically acclaimed novel I desperately needed my life to become.
• “I’m quite something, aren’t I?” said Farrell, not bragging but participating in my heavy-breathing delight. Farrell had the ability to appreciate himself, to stand at a remove and make an unbiased judgment. He didn’t have a crush on himself; he was a fair-minded critic reviewing his own work.
• That’s how obliviously young I was. I’d just done something that I’d grasp, through the most gut-wrenching trial and error, to never, ever do: Don’t ask a question you don’t want the answer to. Don’t leave yourself wide open to the ugliest or, even worse, the most casual truth.
• may I be honest? None of your facial features belong together, it’s as if they were ordered from separate catalogues, yet they’ve formed the most marvelous peace treaty. And in your own oddly cubist way, you’re quite sexy.”
• “Well, I suppose what I’d really like,” he said, “is to major in connoisseurship, perhaps the History of Taste. The comprehensive study of the world’s most perfectly achieved flourishes and deadpan, devastating remarks. The sculpting of time and space through excess or refusal. And the Aristotelian debate over off-center vase placement on a hall table. But because this school is so limited, I’ll probably end up in Art History or English Literature. And you?”
• I didn’t arrive at this lunatic conclusion after careful, exhaustive study. It’s an innate and utterly sublime prejudice. <> Conversely, are straight people convinced of their own superiority? Please. Just consult pretty much every Great Work of Fiction, Film Classic, or election result. Heterosexuality is the world’s default setting, it’s humanity’s go-to correct answer. I’m not worried about straight people; as Farrell once said, “I maintain a royal pity for them.” <> For me, being gay meant being instantly and gratifyingly different. I gained an outsider’s perspective. I’d take nothing for granted. Being gay meant I’d already demolished a cardinal rule of social acceptance, so why not pulverize, or at least splinter, as many as I’d like? Being gay meant membership, in a tradition of culture and style and outrage
• Is it conceivable to be heterosexual, male, and fabulous? Maybe, but the research has never been done, because those guys don’t need to be fabulous. Which is either their enviable strength or their infinite tragedy. Which is a very gay thing to say.
• Theories abound: these chanteuses channel the soapy anguish of queer lives, or they borrow the loving mockery of drag. No other performers are asked to diagnose their ardent followings, as if their talent is a pathology. So if anyone needs to know why gay guys were among Bette Midler’s first and most vocal fans, the only accurate answer is this: Why wasn’t everyone? Because eventually, the world caught on.
• Where a court-martial was convened in the front parlor, which is reserved for visits from senators, ambassadors, and only the most odious white-collar felons
• Because after that kiss and that night, being in love was no longer a decision. I’d made the leap, from musical comedy to grand opera. I was on the poster, over the title. Being in love is a means of starring in your own life. It’s why, when teenagers smirk that a person or vulnerability is “so gay,” I want to respond, “You wish.”
• We were superstitious, because that’s all we had, so we wouldn’t allow death any excess real estate. Death was too greedy.
• “There’s no point in arguing about any of this,” said Bolt. “Or in my emphasizing the result of Farrell’s lifestyle.” <> That word. That cheesy abuse of two wonderful things, life and style. Curdled into the ugliest condemnation.

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I'm not really in the mood for Christmas stories, but Jeanette Winterson did make the story of Christmas super interesting in the opening chapter.

• After the Reformation, Mary, who had been treated like the fourth member of Godhead, was demoted. The Reformation wasn’t good for women; we soon hit the Europe-wide witch burnings, and of course the Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 were Puritans of the most uncompromising sort
• In New England the Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas in 1659 and that law wasn’t repealed until 1681. In England, under Cromwell, Christmas had already been banned since 1647, and remained so until 1660.
• In Catholic countries in Europe then and now, and in Latin America now, the cult of Mary, the mystery of the Virgin birth, the union of mother and child is still powerful and persuasive. Every time a woman gives birth she is the fleeting tableau of the holiest of happenings. Daily life and devotional life are held together in this image.
  And it’s an image with its roots deeper than Christianity.
  If we look back into Greek and Roman history we can see that gods and marvellous mortals are usually born of one divine and one human parent... The New Testament was written in Greek. The Gospel writers wanted to fix their Messiah in the roll call of superheros with a divine dad.
• So the Mary myth brilliantly manages two magnetically opposed forces: the new religion of Christianity offers a tale of god-into-man divine birth. Mary is special and singled out – like in the hero stories... At the same time, her purity and submission allow the new religion to break away from the riotous pagan sex cults and fertility rites that the Jews hated.
• The Roman festival of Saturnalia is part of the story. This was a typical midwinter festival celebrating the turning of the sun ... The pagan Emperor Aurelian declared December 25th Natalis ­Solis ­Invicti – the birth of the invincible sun. The festival included gift-­giving, party-going, wearing silly hats, getting drunk, lighting candles and roaring fires as sun symbols and decorating public ­places with evergreens. This festival was swiftly followed by Kalends – where we get our word calendar.
• In 1822 another American, Clement Moore, nailed the definitive Santa in his poem ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’. Everybody knows those opening lines: ‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’
  This is the moment when St Nick gets his reindeer.
  But he was still wearing green – his colour as a pre-Christian ­fertility god.
  Enter Coca-Cola.
• Cards, carols and, the most Victorian of all, the Christmas Ghost Story.
  Telling stories round the fire is as old as language... But the ghost story as a phenomenon is a 19th century phenomenon. One theory is that the spectres and apparitions claimed in so many sightings were a result of low-level carbon-monoxide poisoning from gas lamps... But there’s a psychological side to this too. The 19th century was haunted by itself. Its new industrialisation seemed to have unleashed the very powers of hell... That this is also the century of organised charity and philanthropy is not a coincidence.
• In America, Christmas wasn’t declared a federal holiday until 1870 (after the American Civil War as a way of reuniting north and south in a shared tradition).
• We don’t lose these associations; the past comes with us, and with luck we reinvent it, which is what I am suggesting we do with Christmas. And everything is a story... Writing is an epiphany of its own, in the sense of something unexpected being revealed. Christmas, which seems so familiar, maybe even worn out, is a celebration of the unexpected.